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Spotlight: Metro Diner Puts All Effort On The Plate

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At Metro Diner, the food is impressive and sincere, and the atmosphere leaves no question about the diner designation.

Especially if you sit at the lunch counter, as I did, snagging the only single stool available and thus avoiding joining the huddled masses at the door. There, you’re treated to a master class in short order cooking and the choreography that is necessary for 11 men — no women were working in the galley — to flip, ladle, slice, plate and pass without drawing blood or leaving other permanent marks.

The fellow sitting next to me had just finished his plate of meatloaf as I was getting mine, and he exclaimed to the cook on the other side of the counter that it was “the best meatloaf he had ever had.” I can’t go quite that far. But he was young and has many more years of meatloafing to catch up to my sampling. But I will say it was pretty good.

It featured two thick slices of loaf, a blend of beef, pork and turkey with carrots, celery and mushrooms plus fine bread crumbs. The meat slices are finished in a pan to give the surfaces a bit of a crust. They’re placed on a plate along with lumpy, skin-on mashed potatoes, both ladled with gravy, and served with sauteed zucchini and squash for a reason that completely escapes me. But then the hunk of baguette was also unnecessary, as good a baguette as it was.

I also had a cup of the chili. It was thick with ground beef and red and black beans, and someone had obviously been taught — properly, in my book — that to make a good batch of chili requires a heavy hand with the chili powder. Unfortunately, the temp was a bit tepid.

Metro Diner took over the space that was a Carmel Cafe ever so briefly. It’s rather drab, but that’s preferred to the faux retro ‘50s diner that too many places try to emulate in lieu of doing better food.